Be sure to include your name, daytime phone number, address, name and phone number of legal next-of-kin, method of payment, and the name of the funeral home/crematory to contact for verification of death.

Few Americans, less than one percent, are actively enrolled in the military, a result of cutbacks in recruitment and other factors. That’s far lower than in previous generations, and yet our role globally is not diminishing.

The case of the 43 missing college students from a poor Southern region in Mexico ought to heighten Americans’ concerns. A stable Mexico is in our best interests and this case is astounding for its scale of violence and corruption, even for Mexico.

The Starbucks brand has massive clout, even while it is being belittled. Every coffee stand in America with more than two locations is trying desperately to differentiate itself from Starbucks, while also being cognizant that it is feeding off of the company’s massive success.Imagine if other major national corporations took to holding company-wide talk sessions around race. A lot of America could be reached.

It’s not OK to profit from the presence of immigrants and then turn around and attack them through legislation. This year’s attempt by the Kansas Legislature to stop allowing some immigrant children to pay in-state fees at universities and colleges will probably die in committee. But the real estate holdings of one of the bill’s sponsors raises a question of fairness.

Public education in Kansas is under assault by a legislature that simply doesn’t want to be told to play fair in how it funds the state’s schools. One can only hope that parents and taxpayers will stop this nonsense.

Librarians and some of their most fervent patrons — teenagers — plan to bite back at stalled spending on public libraries around Missouri. Two busloads of teenagers, many out of school for spring break, will be in the Kansas City group descending on the state capitol to meet with local representatives and to protest through a rally.

Women in Missouri make 71 cents to every dollar that men earn when they work full time and year-round. Efforts to better understand, and possibly rectify, pay differences between men and women are running into confounding opposition from the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

If you want to know what institutional racism looks like, Ferguson is a perfect case study. Bedrock principles of policing, the constitutional necessities of reasonable suspicion and probable cause, were often cast to the winds.

The suicide death of Missouri auditor and gubernatorial candidate Tom Schweich shines a light on an ugly reality. A candidate could be undercut in some circles by the insinuation that he is not a Christian. In 2015, sad to say, there are still people in my home state and 49 other states who would not vote for a candidate because he or she is Jewish.

While much of America has finally begun to face the complexities of reducing the number of sexual assaults on college campuses through real action and honest conversations, this is what the gun lobby has been cooking up: the nonsense argument that sexual assaults of young women on college campuses can be stopped by arming coeds with guns.

Kansans, perhaps more than citizens of any other state, know how discrimination targeted at homosexuals looks when it is flaunted on a national media platform. We faced it for years. The now deceased Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka paraded his hatred toward gay people around the globe. The state was ashamed that Phelps’ foolishness germinated in our soil.

In 2008, Alvin Sykes got Congress to pass the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which has the FBI and the Justice Department attempting to resolve pre-1970 cases before witnesses and suspects die. Now he is pressing for an executive order from President Barack Obama to make the cold case unit permanent within the Justice Department. There would be no limits on when a crime occurred.

An exhibit in Overland Park near where three people were killed outside Jewish facilities last year has sparked a thoughtful discussion about violence, hate and art. The lingering power of gun violence forced a decision to remove two beautifully thought-provoking porcelain installations.

Those who press marriage as an answer to poverty tend to know very little about what it means to be poor. They talk about poor people’s bad choices or deficient work ethic, but they don’t acknowledge the way poverty grinds people, the way it forecloses the options that families with stable jobs enjoy, the way it extracts great costs and exertions to get every little thing.